Talk:List of countries with annual rates and counts for killings by law enforcement officers

Sources

None of these sources give me any data on the US or Germany for the years that are shown in the table. Where do these numbers come from? --Saftorangen (talk) 01:18, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

Just a thought.. In the source for Finland it says it has been 3 for year 2016, but 7 from beginning of 2000 in total, so makes wonder how comparable the other values are then. 86.115.11.182 (talk) 11:53, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

The first source listed in this article "5,287 killings in Venezuela 'resistance to authority' security operations in 2018, U.N. says". is no longer available. Can anyone find the original document from the UN? -- Somoking (talk) 01:12, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

Replaced dead link with UN report. Borysk5 (talk) 13:06, 12 October 2019 (UTC)

The number of people killed in Uruguay (22) is mentioned on the cited source as the number of killings for the first six months of 2019, not the whole year ( cited source )

The number of people killed in Argentina (95) is mentioned on the cited source as the number of killings only on the city of Buenos Aires and the Buenos Aires greater area, not the whole country (cited source ) — Preceding unsigned comment added by 77.250.71.248 (talk) 21:17, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Misrepresenting Sources

The source given for Canada state, in its first paragraph, that it is "the first country-wide database of every person who died or was killed during a police intervention." This is noticeably broader than "police killings" as it includes all deaths (not just killings) and does not limit itself to killings by police. Another source should be found, or the source should be reviewed to ensure that only actual police killings are included in the total on this list, as doing otherwise constitutes misrepresentation. --EvieGHJ (talk) 22:36, 31 May 2020 (UTC)

The number for the UK is only 3, citing a source for fatal police shootings. Obviously number of fatals shootings is not the same as number of killings, especially as very few police in the UK carry firearms. In fact, the article referenced in the notes section shows a much larger list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforcement_officers_in_the_United_Kingdom --Simonyouel (talk) 19:22, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

The specific UK article, which is well referenced, lists three for 2019 and this article links to that article. I don't know where you got 79 (perhaps combined for all years? Note that this is for a single year, the one listed under "year listed"). If you believe 79 is correct, please provide a ref (WP:V) that support it. I assume the MOS:NUMBERS issue, change of ref title and random change of Iceland was the result of edit conflict (aka, you were editing while I corrected it, i.e. that part of your edit was unintentional). I'll leave it to others to sort out the issue for Canada mentioned in the first post. RN1970 (talk) 20:17, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Strike in my above comment because that issue was resolved (w. another number+relevant ref.) before I dealt with it. RN1970 (talk) 20:22, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

Israel

Why not included? Weiserma (talk) 22:33, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

United Kingdom

I note that this highly misleading text has recently been added to the United Kingdom entry: "Fatal shootings in England and Wales. Does not include Scotland and Northern Ireland."

The number of three does indeed refer to three fatal police shootings in England in 2019, but it still includes Scotland and Northern Ireland by virtue of the fact that neither had any fatal police shootings in that year. There have actually been no fatal police shootings in Northern Ireland since 2011, and there have been none in Scotland this century. I am therefore removing the misleading text. Nick Cooper (talk) 13:18, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

A Message from Fatal Encounters Dot Org regarding United States statistics

To whom it may concern,

An apparent controversy has arisen on Wikipedia over the numbers of people killed during police actions in the United States.

Fatal Encounters has been noted as having the highest numbers of people who people who die during police actions. I am the executive director of that group. I’m a longtime journalist, and my investigative work has been cited and awarded locally, at the state level, and nationally.

There are three generally cited non-government databases containing police-related deaths. Each has its own criteria for choosing which incidents are included. I’ll talk a bit about each with links to my assertions. I’m sorry, but some of the links will be redundant because different assertions come from the same document.

Washington Post Fatal Force. Launched May 30, 2015. Washington Post collects “only those shootings in which a police officer, in the line of duty, shot and killed a civilian.” “In 2015, The Post began tracking more than a dozen details about each killing — including the race of the deceased, the circumstances of the shooting, whether the person was armed and whether the victim was experiencing a mental-health crisis — by culling local news reports, law enforcement websites and social media and by monitoring independent databases such as Killed by Police and Fatal Encounters.”

All this would be great, if the corpus of police killings only included people shot by local police, but it doesn’t, as evidence by the George Floyd, and the fact that the Post doesn’t collect deaths caused by federal agencies, for example, Joshua Steven Mitchell was killed on July 25, 2019 by federal agents makes no appearance in WaPo’s dataset. It would also be great if the poor reporting of the Washington Post didn’t result in severe undercounts at least in 2018 and 2019. This quote is regarding the 2019 data in the Root: “After comparing the Fatal Encounters dataset to the Post’s we determined that the Post failed to identify 117 deaths that fit Fatal Force’s criteria. The Post’s list also had 13 duplicate entries; three deaths that occurred prior to 2019; two people who died, but weren’t killed by a cop and one person who did not die at all.”

It's possible to check the veracity of this statement by resorting WaPo’s database and comparing the Unique IDs, which are created when the incident is added, to the record to the dates, which represent the date of injury. More than 60 deaths that had been previously recorded in the Fatal Encounters dataset in 2019 were added the Washington Post’s database after Michael Harriot’s story came out on January 24.

Today, June 6, 2020, Fatal Encounters documents 517 non-suicide deaths by gunshot, and Washington Post lists 452. The Washington Post is truly misinforming the world about the extent of police-involved killing.

Mapping Police Violence. Launched March 2015. The database is helmed by Sam Sinyangwe. The about page says it uses three datasources, FatalEncounters.org, the U.S. Police Shootings Database and KilledbyPolice.net. This is not entirely accurate, although it’s probably more outdated than deceitful. The U.S. Police Shootings database was compiled in August 2014 by the sports blog Deadspin. The original KilledbyPolice.net shut down on December 31, 2018. The URL was purchased by an unidentified person, and appears to be API using the Washington Post’s data, with its current undercounts. The site appears to be taking advantage of the current public interest to profit from advertising the sales of gunsights.

I believe that Mapping Police Violence only uses Fatal Encounters data appended with the Washington Post’s data in the columns Alleged Weapon (Source: WaPo); Alleged Threat Level (Source: WaPo); Fleeing (Source: WaPo); Body Camera (Source: WaPo), as you can see on MPV’s spreadsheet (This is a download from MPV’s Github site.). To this data, Sinyangwe adds a column in which he analyzes whether the person was armed or unarmed.

Lately, MPV has added non-fatal shootings from the 30 largest U.S. city police agencies, which is awesome, but irrelevant to the question of how many people are killed by police in the United States, which this post is discussing. Mapping Police Violence's greatest strengths are its data visualizations and discussions of national policing policies in Campaign Zero and 8 Can't Wait, which are entirely outside of Fatal Encounters' wheelhouse. We collect the data and make it freely available for people who have the background to discuss.

The reason Mapping Police Violence has less data than Fatal Encounters is because Sinyangwe only includes incidents in which an officer had physical contact or direct cause in a person’s death. Using data from his cause of death column, he appears to include only cases that fall into 10 categories. Some of these categories include secondary and tertiary causes of death, for example, Gunshot, Taser, Beanbag. While he does include the vehicle deaths caused when a person is killed by a vehicle driven by a police officer, or when the officer uses spike sticks to disable a vehicle or a so-called PIT maneuver to knock a vehicle off the road, he would not include a death where a vehicle driven by the pursued rolls and kills a bicyclist. The deletions are based on Sinyangwe’s own biases as to which data should be included, not on generally accepted practices. Particularly in vehicle-pursuit deaths, Fatal Encounters’ philosophy is that nobody would die in a police chase — including “innocent victims” — if the police weren’t engaging in often unnecessary pursuits.

Mapping Police Violence has a different methodology than Fatal Encounters, which is fine, but it’s not a methodology that’s supported by top law enforcement agencies. In the United States, the top law enforcement agency is the Department of Justice.

There are two federal police datasets that are generally cited with regard to the type of deaths we’re talking about: The Supplementary Homicide Report from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report (Handbook here) in which police homicides are identified with the circumstance code, “felon killed by police”; the Arrest-Related Deaths portion the Deaths In Custody Reporting. For police pursuit deaths data, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration is generally cited. There are other data sources, like the National Vital Statistics System and now the National Use-of-Force Data Collection system. The NUFDC hasn’t reported yet, but it is already showing the failures of the SHR because reporting isn’t mandatory, so less than 40 percent of the nation’s police agencies are reporting.

In the interests of brevity, I want to point out two documents that show that Fatal Encounters counts are not just acceptable by law enforcement and presumably by academia and the public, they are the norm.

First, go to page 4 on the Arrest-Related Deaths Program Redesign Study. In the sidebar at the top of the page, Arrest-Related Deaths Program Scope, you will see that the program includes deaths caused by Shooting, Other use of force, Accident, Suicide, and Natural cause, and “Fatal Encounters most closely matched the ARD program scope.” The ARDP did not include deaths caused by off-duty officer, which Fatal Encounters does; the reasoning being, that off-duty killings are often judged in agencies and courts exactly though the officer were on duty and assisting. Be that as it may, it’s an editorial decision made by Fatal Encounters, and it’s transparently disclosed in the brief descriptions in Column T on the spreadsheet.

Finally, while little notice has been paid recently to the deaths caused by police pursuits, they make up approximately 20 percent of the deaths represented in Fatal Encounters. It’s a serious issue that has been overshadowed by the issue of police shootings, but still shows over-representation of some races. For example, black people are more than three times as likely to be killed during a police chase. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is the only federal agency that comprehensively tracks these deaths, data available here. These data are submitted by law enforcement. For more information about this data, check the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) Analytical User’s Manual. This police agency-submitted data shows that police agencies recognize and document that pursuit-related deaths include deaths caused by the person being pursued, including passengers in the pursued vehicles and third parties who had nothing to do with the chase.

Fatal Encounters Dot Org. Launched May 2012. FE is a federal 501(c)3 nonprofit. The first national database of people who die during police interactions in the United States. Fatal Encounters documents non-police deaths that occur when police are present or are precipitated by police action or presence. Officer deaths are included when a second officer is present, including friendly fire incidents, suicides, criminal actions—like domestic violence—and vehicle accidents that occur when police are present or are precipitated by police action or presence. In addition to intentional use of force deaths, this database includes deaths caused by off-duty officers, suicides that happen when police are present, and deaths of people that occur during police pursuits, including vehicle deaths, falling from bridges, and drownings. In short, if a law enforcement officer was present or precipitated a death, it is included in this database.

Sincerely,

D. Brian Burghart Fatalencounters (talk) 22:14, 6 June 2020 (UTC)

Phillipines

The numbers for the Phillipines are only counting the people who died in the anti-drug war, not the total number of deaths, including from other events. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Developedby (talk • contribs) 13:54, 8 June 2020 (UTC)

Honduras

The list appears to be in descending order of "Rate per 10 million people" in which case Honduras is too high in the list , with 40.4? JezGrove (talk) 22:19, 14 June 2020 (UTC)

Belgium: Data Summary

Summary of the data found in Belgiums annual reports.

synopsis.txt

Comite P
--------

1996 - involuntary manslaughter     2

Total: 2

1997 - involuntary manslaughter     mention (revoked in 2000 report)
     - off-duty suicide             1

Total: 1

1998 - involuntary manslaughter     confidential (revoked in 2000 report)
     - murder                       1 (revoked in 2000 report)
     - manslaughter                 1 (+1 verified in 2000 report)

Total: 2

1999 - manslaughter                 1
     - murder                       1 (verified in 2000 report)

Total: 2

2000 - murder                       1
     - death other than by crime    1

Total: 2

2001 - off/on-duty suicide          14 (verified in 2006 report)

Total: 14

2002 - murder                       1
     - off/on-duty suicide          12 (verified in 2006 report)

Total: 13

2003 - murder                       1
     - off/on-duty suicide          22 (verified in 2006 report)

Total: 23

2004 - [attempted murder/mansl.]   (1)
     - off/on-duty suicide          20 (verified in 2006 report)

Total: 20

2005 - involuntary manslaughter     1
     - off/on-duty suicide          21 (verified in 2006 report)

Total: 22

2006 - off/on-duty suicide          22

Total: 22

2007

Total: 0

2008 - involuntary manslaughter     1
     - manslaughter                 1

Total: 2

2009 - manslaughter/murder          2 (verified in 2011 report)

Total: 2

2010 - manslaughter/murder          2 (+1 verified in 2011 report)

Total: 3

2011 - manslaughter/murder          1 (verified in 2012 report)

Total: 1

2012 - manslaughter/murder          2

Total: 2

2013 - manslaughter/murder          1 (+1 verified in 2014 report)

Total: 2

2014 - manslaughter/murder          7

Total: 7

2015

Total: 0

2016

Total: 0

2017 - manslaughter/murder          mention (in 2018 report)

Total: >0

2018

Total: 0

212.88.246.224 (talk) 13:52, 19 June 2020 (UTC)

Rate per 10 million People

Hi, this may seem odd to talk about, but I was wondering how the rates were developed. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Desibanter (talk • contribs) 05:49, 22 July 2020 (UTC)

The rate for the USA is higher than Iraq but when comparing #of deaths/population size *10000000, the USA has one of 46.6, while Iraq's 48.47.

Year listed

Right now, the year listed for each country is inconsistent. Should we use a single year to count every kill (like the numbers for 2019), or should we still allow the use of more than one year to count killings (like in the Philippines, Uruguay, and South Africa)? pandakekok9 (talk) 06:58, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Title length

Can anyone propose a shorter title? This is really excessive. Invasive Spices (talk) 19:47, 19 March 2023 (UTC)

How about this:

Killings by law enforcement. Rates and counts by country

Versus current title:

List of countries with annual rates and counts for killings by law enforcement officers

I noticed with another list article that a long title greatly reduced the daily page views. After reducing the title the page views are back up to where they were before. 4 times higher than during the slump. See:

Talk:List of countries by incarceration rate#Reverted back to "List of countries by incarceration rate"

This is because when the title shows up in Google results the important part is not cut off due to Google's title length limitations in results. So people see that a Wikipedia page has what they are looking for, and immediately go there due to the trust people have in Wikipedia.

The old title was not clear:

List of killings by law enforcement officers by country

So many people looking for stats probably ignored it in Google search results, thinking it was a list of individuals killed.

The suggested title is both clear and short. This should help increase page views some. --Timeshifter (talk) 04:45, 20 March 2023 (UTC)

The new title's structure (i.e. breaking the title into two parts, separated by a period) is not in keeping with our standard title formatting. I would suggest opening a RM to get more input on alternative title options. Colin M (talk) 16:00, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

I see no restrictions on periods here:

Wikipedia:Article titles

--Timeshifter (talk) 19:31, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Can you name any other examples of articles that use a title format like this? Colin M (talk) 20:45, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Naming conventions (lists). Colons, commas, en-dashes, etc. Under preferred, common, and acceptable sections. --Timeshifter (talk) 21:13, 30 March 2023 (UTC)

New Title

The title with a period is pretty odd, we should change it to something like "Killings by law enforcement by country". Coolbeans7Z (talk) 01:48, 3 June 2023 (UTC)